Ashish Bidadi

Anyone can now produce working software, which is genuinely the most exciting shift of my career. But you still have to understand how systems fit together, how to find the thing that broke, and what is worth making at all. Without that, the tools just help you build the wrong thing faster, at lower quality, with more noise.

Time saved, cost removed, revenue added. And the number that gets ignored: how cheaply it slots into what people already do. Adoption cost is the denominator, and most AI products lose there rather than on capability.

AI is on the order of the internet, the PC, and mobile, not the order of social media. We spent the last fifteen years optimizing for engagement instead of value, and we know exactly how that went. My ethos has always been to build things that improve people's lives. This wave is the best chance my generation of builders has had to actually deliver on that, and the first chance to get it wrong at the same scale.

Small, medium, or large, across nearly every industry. There is a reckoning coming for the ones that treated this as a later problem.

Cheap building means more shots on goal, so use them on the right things rather than optimizing purely for returns. Most of the assumptions I inherited about company building deserve another look: whether to hoard capital, whether speed beats quality, what a customer or investor relationship is actually for. I think a small team making something people will pay for is the more durable way to build a company.